Spoke to PM Modi on Cauvery issue: Deve Gowda

October 2, 2016, 11:38 PM IST

New Delhi :Former prime minister HD Deve Gowda on Sunday said he had a “brief” telephonic conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Cauvery river water dispute, but did not divulge the details of it.

“Prime Minister Modi had called me up and spoken for a brief while on the Cauvery dispute,” he said after garlanding the portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri here on their 147th and 112th birth anniversaries respectively. Gowda, a former chief minister of Karnataka, however, did not divulge the details of the conversation.

Earlier, he had expressed disappointment with the prime minister’s “reluctance” to intervene in the dispute and said he was awaiting the outcome of tomorrow’s one-day session of the state legislature. “I have full confidence in both Modi and Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. I will wait for the outcome of the one-day legislature session. Let me see, what decision the elected leaders take,” he had said.

The Supreme Court, on September 30, had asked Karnataka to discharge 6,000 cusecs of water from October 1 to 6, while warning that “no one would know when the ‘wrath of the law’ would fall on it”. It had also ordered all the stakeholders in the dispute — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry — to give the names of their representatives to be included in the board which would be headed by Union Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti.